A Scottish company believes it has come up with a technique for encouraging more designers to adopt multicore processors
An embedded development tool for maximising the performance of multicore processors has been introduced by CriticalBlue.
The Edinburgh-based company has spent three years developing the embedded multicore programming system which is called Prism.
With different versions for specific
microprocessor architectures including ARM and MIPS, the tool allows designers to access the benefits of running existing sequential code on multi-threaded architectures.
“We see that multicore architectures based on symmetric multi-processing are impacting design strategies. Current technologies require designers to make undesirable changes when migrating software to multicore architectures,” David Stewart, CEO,
CriticalBlue told
EW.
“Maybe we need to provide designers with an incentive to migrate to multicores,” said Stewart.
This is where Prism fits in. The software tool takes the existing sequential software or code and runs various operating configurations for the code in a multicore environment.
The designer can use the tool to investigate different threading strategies, numbers of cores, dependency removal, and scheduling policies.
“It allows software teams adopting multicore platforms to quickly ramp up on parallel programming and to realise the full performance potential of these architectures,” said Stewart.
Then once code changes have been made for running on the multicore architecture, Prism can be used to verify that the changes produce safe, efficient code.
It can be used to identify dependencies between disparate code modules with obtuse, indirect communication paths, measuring their impact and checking for hard-to-debug race conditions.
Early users of the tool for assess the efficiency of multicore programming include Freescale, NEC Electronics, Renesas and Toshiba.
It is an
Eclipse plug-in which sits alongside the standard development environment so no new compilers and instruction sets are needed.
The tool works by dynamically tracing the user’s software execution, requiring an underlying simulation engine, or model, provided by the platform or another third-party vendor.
According to Stewart, integrations have already been completed with ARM and MIPS multicore processors with Power Architecture and SH4 in development.
The currently available version runs in user mode, while an initial OS capable version supporting Symmetric Multi-Processing (SMP) Linux is demonstrable today. Prism is available as a licence priced at $200 per month.